Over 580 Different Jobs in Greece listed as "Hazardous" = Early Retirement

Thursday, 11 March 2010

Vasia Veremi may be only 28, but as a hairdresser in Athens, she is keenly aware that, under a current law that treats her job as hazardous to her health, she has the right to retire with a full pension at age 50.
“I use a hundred different chemicals every day — dyes, ammonia, you name it,” she said. “You think there’s no risk in that?”

“People should be able to retire at a decent age,” Ms. Veremi added. “We are not made to live 150 years.”

Right, but that still makes it difficult to explain to anyone outside Athens why the Greek government has identified at least 580 job categories that are deemed to be hazardous enough to merit retiring early — at age 50 for women and 55 for men.

The law includes some predictably dangerous jobs like coal mining and bomb disposal. But it also covers positions like radio and television presenters who are thought to be at risk from the bacteria on their microphones and musicians playing wind instruments who must contend with gastric reflux as they puff and blow <--- are they serious?

As a consequence of decades of bargains struck between strong unions and weak governments, Greece has promised early retirement to about 700,000 employees, or 40 percent of its work force, giving it one the lowest average retirement ages in Europe at 61.

But its patchwork system of early retirement has contributed to the out-of-control state spending that led to Europe’s current sovereign debt crisis.

The predicament has emerged as a divisive topic within Europe, especially because Germany, Greece’s most stubborn taskmaster on fiscal matters, has already taken politically difficult steps to increase its retirement age to 67 and reduce benefits.

Indeed, the problem with Greek pensions far outweighs the troubles caused by finagling with its accounts in the early 1990s to get its official deficit figures low enough to qualify to join the euro club. A recent report by the European Commission found that Greek spending on pensions and health care for its aging population, if left unchecked, would soar from just over 20 percent of G.D.P. today to about 37 percent of G.D.P. by 2060, the highest level in Europe.

Of course, Greece is not alone. Bigger countries like Germany, France, Spain and Italy have relied for decades on a munificent state financed by a range of stiff taxes to keep the political peace. Now, governments across Europe are being pressed to re-examine their commitments to providing generous pensions over extended retirements because the downturn has suddenly pushed at least part of these hidden costs to the surface.

The situation in the United States is different but equally dire. The United States government will face its own fiscal reckoning, analysts say, as 78 million baby boomers begin drawing on underfinanced Social Security and Medicare programs to support them in retirement.
Without some combination of raising taxes, reducing benefits or pushing back the retirement age, both programs will run out of money within the next few decades. And many American states are woefully short of meeting their pension obligations for public employees.

In Europe, the conflict has already erupted on the streets of several major cities, with workers demanding that generous retirement policies be kept while governments press to pare pensions and raise retirement ages because taxpayers cannot bear any additional weight and creditors will no longer finance excessive borrowing.

To make matters worse, the unfunded pension liabilities far outweigh the high levels of official sovereign debt that governments owe creditors, which have caught Greece and several other weak European nations in a borrowing vise. And Greece’s government is setting itself up for a far bigger crisis down the road because it has not set aside nearly enough money to pay for all the pension promises it has made.

According to research by Jagadeesh Gokhale, an economist at the Cato Institute in Washington, bringing Greece’s pension obligations onto its balance sheet would show that the government’s debt is in reality equal to 875 percent of its gross domestic product, the highest level in the 16-nation euro zone, and far above its official debt level of 113 percent.

Yeah RTG!
And I have to keep taking stressfull phone calls while I'm trying to post on the MTO! I'm going to move to Macedonia(Kotori - Lerin) and retire on the pension as well, after doing my hazardous job for so long! And further more I have to put up with people claiming I am some other nationality and telling me my ancestors are not Macedonian, surely that will get me a full pension in the old country!

If one were a cynic one could say the Greeks have taken this 2012 end of the world thing to hart. Spend up big like there is no tomorrow. lets hope there isnt one for them in the next few months. smrt na dusmanot.

how can a nation have respect for truth when their national identity their very soul is totally false and based on nothing more than wishful thinking when their occupation of macedonia is so recent in history, less than 40 years before my birth yet they claim it as theirs for 4000 years.